I applied for a Software Engineer position.

I was contacted by a recruiter for some general questions and background information. I was then instructed that I would be receiving a call the following week from another software engineer for a technical screening.

The engineer called me and went over a few technical questions, mainly regarding JavaScript and runtime (Big O notation). I was then asked to provide two algorithms in code within an hour after the call.

Overall, the interview seemed to go well, or so I thought.

I wasn't contacted with the results until the following week. I was turned down, but they cannot give you any information about why you didn't meet their standards. They won't tell you if your code is wrong, where you went wrong, or where you could improve as a developer. It's just a standard "your skills don't meet our needs at this time" response.

This is disappointing, given that you prepare for hours upon hours of your time and energy and receive zero feedback.

How can you prepare? I went over all of my old CS 101 notes, including hash tables, data structures, and the theory behind them. It can be a bit overwhelming if you haven't visited that information for over a decade.

My advice is to brush up on your theory and write some practical examples along those lines, like sorting an array using Merge Sort in your favorite language. Don't worry about trying to get better in your languages; you either know it now or don't know it.

It's nearly impossible to prepare for everything for this position, given that they don't hire a JavaScript developer or a C++ developer. They just hire developers in general and, as they indicated, only the top 1% of developers in the world.

Don't bother asking about the position because you could be working on any number of projects, and they will not give you any specifics.

Overall, I rate the experience a 2.5 out of 5. The interview questions I received weren't terribly difficult, but I don't know where I went wrong or how I could improve since no feedback is given. That's where Google's policy needs to be revamped.

The people I talked to were nice, but don't expect any personality. It's very dry and straightforward, and I'm not really sure if that's indicative of how people are there.

The YouTube video on working at Google seems like it's such a great place to work, but I can't really say for sure at this time, given my experience thus far with how they approach engineers.

Provide two coding solutions for returning an array by removing duplicates. One solution should have O(n^2) time complexity, and the other should be linear.